Silk Road,49 Camberwell Church Street, London SE5 (020 7703 4832). Meal for two including wine and service, £40

I need to tread carefully here, for this column appears in the shallow end of the paper, far from the reports of evil that men do on the news pages. Thinking one can use a restaurant experience in Camberwell, south London, to get any perspective on a murderous riot thousands of miles away in which dozens - perhaps as many as 200 - people died, is a risky business, larded with arrogance. So I do not wish to overstate the insight that dinner at Silk Road gave me into the civil unrest in Urumqi, the capital city of China's Xinjiang province, in July, in which large numbers of Hans and Uighurs died.

What the food did do, however, is point up that ethnic difference. China is opening itself to us. The reporting of those riots in a part of the country most of us had never heard of before was more explicit than almost any I could recall. That doesn't necessarily mean we understand it. In the past decade or so we have finally begun to recognise that huge countries like India and China do not simply have a single culinary tradition. It is very cool indeed to talk knowledgeably about the differences in food between, say, Beijing, Shanghai and Hunan. Again, it doesn't mean we know what we're talking about.

I am well eaten (if less well travelled) and still managed to come a cropper in a review of Gourmet San, a cheap, boisterous restaurant on London's Bethnal Green Road, which I described as being Sichuanese on account of big plates of stuff rustling in piles of red peppers and salt and aromatic peppercorns. I was later taken to task by Fuchsia Dunlop, Britain's head girl when it comes to Chinese regional cookery. She didn't think the food was Sichuanese at all. Some of it was from Xinjiang, she said. The huge helpings suggested Dongbei. As to the chef, he was apparently from Harbin in Heilongjiang province. At which point my eyes glazed over. Can't I just say it was really nice?

The food at Silk Road is really nice and really distinctive. It advertises itself as serving the food of Xinjiang, and Fuchsia - even allowing for a few pork dishes on the menu, which place it on the liberal side of Muslim observance - I'm going to let them define themselves. It is a simple, brightly lit room with communal tables and benches, and a reassuringly short menu, compared to the novels you find in many Chinese restaurants. The most familiar plate of food was a pork fillet stir-fry with curly black fungus, in a sauce spiked with chilli. Less familiar was the big-plate chicken, though I should say we had the medium plate; our waiter didn't think we'd have a hope in hell of finishing it.

What arrived was a sizable bowl of a light, savoury chilli broth - though not one of those nuclear, sweat-from-the-scalp jobs you get in Sichuan restaurants - bobbing with pieces of chicken on the bone. Alongside the chicken were large pieces of potato braising nicely in the liquor. I can't think of another Chinese dish that features potatoes like this (I don't count the cold, congealing basket in which crispy chilli beef is occasionally served). Once we had dredged out most of what it had to offer we were brought a plate of wide, glutinous hand-made noodles, which were tipped unceremoniously into that fabulous broth, those noodles marked for their blandness against the kick of the liquid. It was a thrilling bowlful, equally so for costing just £9.

Silk Road's grilled lamb. Photograph: Katherine Rose

Pieces of grilled lamb came crusted with ground cumin, chilli and salt. We pulled them off the metal spikes with our fingers and felt butch and prehistoric for doing so. I appreciated the inclusion of little squares of crisped lamb fat, though beware: they are lovely the moment they come off the grill; grim and greasy a minute later. Less thrilling were lamb kidneys, which were tough and tasted of what kidneys are designed to filter the body's fluids down to. A plate of cold, crunchy, shredded kelp dressed with enthusiastic amounts of chilli and garlic was curiously refreshing. My companion and I drank a couple of beers each and agreed that while what he had eaten was clearly hewn from the same rock as the Chinese food we recognised, this came from its outer edges; from a harder place of cold winter winds.

I know little of Xinjiang and its ethnic strife. But I do know I liked the version of its food served to me at Silk Road.